Idle Words has a very interesting post arguing in favor of Arabic as a choice of language of study, from the perspective of a connoisseur of linguistic oddities.
I would like to stand up for the language nerds and give some reasons for studying Arabic that have nothing to do with politics. The language of the National Designated Other is bound to switch to Chinese in a couple of years, but until colleges start teaching Martian, Arabic is going to remain the strangest, most interesting language you can study in an undergrad classroom.
And don’t fall for the bait and switch with Chinese or Japanese! They might tempt you with an exotic writing system, but after a few months you find out that the underlying language is pretty vanilla, and meanwhile there is a stack of three thousand flash cards standing in between you and the ability to skim a newspaper.
Arabic, on the other hand, twists healthy minds in twelve ways.
The language nerd author asserts that you can learn the writing system in two weeks. Sounds like a dare to me.
Special Prosecutor Angela Corey, who arrived with a reputation for being “too aggressive,” lived up to her reputation by announcing on Monday that she would not bring the matter of the shooting of Trayvon Martin before a Grand Jury at all, and would decide herself on whether to bring charges.
Corey surprised most observers yesterday by charging George Zimmerman with Second Degree Murder instead of Manslaughter.
The relevant Florida law definition reads:
The unlawful killing of a human being, when perpetrated by any act imminently dangerous to another and evincing a depraved mind regardless of human life, although without any premeditated design to effect the death of any particular individual, is murder in the second degree and constitutes a felony of the first degree, punishable by imprisonment for a term of years not exceeding life or as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.
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A news agency report predicted that the prosecutor’s job would not be easy.
The prosecutors must prove Zimmerman’s shooting of Martin was rooted in hatred or ill will and counter his claims that he shot Martin to protect himself while patrolling his gated community in the Orlando suburb of Sanford. Zimmerman’s lawyers would only have to prove by a preponderance of evidence – a relatively low legal standard – that he acted in self-defense at a pretrial hearing to prevent the case from going to trial.
There’s a “high likelihood it could be dismissed by the judge even before the jury gets to hear the case,” Florida defense attorney Richard Hornsby said.
In attempting to create an attack ad, the Obama campaign has inadvertently produced an ad that the Romney campaign ought to be broadcasting all over America.
National Review’s firing of John Derbyshire as the result of his publishing some uncomplimentary opinions about African Americans in a totally different venue struck several conservative commentators, including yours truly, as a cowardly and conformist expression of eyes-on-the-main-chance, professional “realism.”
NR’s Rich Lowry did not actually bow to what David Weigel described as a “micro-movement building [on the left -JDZ] to shame National Review into firing Derbyshire.” He threw Derbyshire directly under the political correctness bus before the left had really begun to howl for blood.
Those of us on the sidelines shrugged, and grimaced a little with distaste, over one more disagreeable example of life in today’s United States in the Second Era of Reconstruction and We-Know-Better social engineering and thought control, but it wasn’t until Gawker published an interview on Monday with John Derbyshire, which incidentally revealed that he is suffering from Leukemia and undergoing Chemotherapy, that the full dimensions of National Review’s actions came into focus.
NR did not just dismiss one of its eccentric and quarrelsome loose cannon contributors for injudicious commentary. NR instantly made a cover-its-own-ass at any cost decision, and facing a minor PC controversy in the middle of a period of time in which racial politics and controversies are actively raging, ruthlessly turned on one of its own they obviously knew was gravely ill.
I’d say that kind of behavior reflects a much more serious discredit on National Review than offenses against the community of fashion’s code of speech propriety ever could.
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About the only positive thing I can find to say for NR is, at least they let Mark Steyn criticize NR’s actions on their own web-site.
The Left is pretty clear about its objectives on everything from climate change to immigration to gay marriage: Rather than win the debate, they’d just as soon shut it down. They’ve had great success in shrinking the bounds of public discourse, and rendering whole areas of public policy all but undiscussable. In such a climate, my default position is that I’d rather put up with whatever racist/sexist/homophobic/Islamophobic/whateverphobic excess everybody’s got the vapors about this week than accept ever tighter constraints on “acceptable†opinion. …
The net result of Derb’s summary execution by NR will be further to shrivel the parameters, and confine debate in this area to ever more unreal fatuities. He knew that mentioning the Great Unmentionables would sooner or later do him in, and, in an age when shrieking “That’s totally racist!†is totally gay, he at least has the rare satisfaction of having earned his colors. Yet what are we to make of wee, inoffensive Dave Weigel over at Slate? The water still churning with blood, the sharks are circling poor old Dave for the sin of insufficiently denouncing the racist Derbyshire. Weigel must go for not enthusiastically bellowing, “Derbyshire must go!†Come to think of it, I should probably go for querying whether Weigel should go.
NR shouldn’t be rewarding those who want to play this game. The more sacrifices you offer up, the more ravenously the volcano belches.
PS If Derb’s piece is sufficiently beyond the pale that its author must be terminated immediately, why is its publisher — our old friend Taki — proudly listed on the NR masthead?
Ben Smith quotes an unnamed conservative lawyer who offers a simultaneously cynical and whimsical explanation of exactly why Obamacare is toast.
You have built an imaginary mansion, with thousands of rooms, on the foundation of Wickard v. Filburn — the 1942 ruling that broadened the understanding of how the Commerce Clause could be used to regulate economic activity.
We aren’t being asked to radically revise the Commerce Clause and throw out seven decades of law, and we won’t. But we know the founders never intended the Commerce Clause to allow the Federal Government to regulate everything on the planet. So we are going to accept Randy Barnett’s basically spurious exception to that basically spurious idea, and throw out the Affordable Care Act on the grounds that the Commerce Clause regulates “activity†(which we don’t really believe), but not “inactivity†(because, why not draw the line somewhere?).
This is to say: You have built a fantasy mansion on the Commerce Clause. You can hardly blame us if, in one wing of this mansion, down a dusty corridor, we build a fantasy room called “inactivity,†lock the door, and don’t let you in.
Mark Judge recently lost both his bicycle and his white guilt:
That’s when I lost it. I had been carefully educated by liberal parents that we are all, black and white, the same. My favorite movie growing up was “In the Heat of the Night.†Yet that often meant not treating everyone the same. It meant treating blacks with a mixture of patronizing condescension and obsequious genuflecting to their Absolute Moral Authority gained from centuries of suffering. It meant not treating everyone the same.
It meant leaving valuable things like a bike in a vulnerable position in a black part of town because you didn’t want to admit that the crime is worse in poor black neighborhoods.
Score one for the Queen. In that moment, I had a change of consciousness. Why was I assuming that the kid who stole my bike was acting out of some terrible pain, as if he had been directly under the lash of Bull Connor? What if he has a car, a nice apartment, a hot girlfriend and good health?
What if he is just a selfish asshole?
I decided that I’m just going to let go of my white guilt. We’re all human, we all experience pain in our lives. And black pain is no different than white pain.
It felt good to say it: Black pain is no different than white pain. I’m tired of people using the moral authority of past generations for their own personal gain and self-aggrandizement. Soledad O’Brien, a Harvard graduate, acts like she just stepped off the Amistad.
His paintings are hanging in an estimated one of every 20 homes in the United States. Fans cite the warm, familiar feeling of his mass-produced works of art, while it has become fashionable for art critics to dismiss his pieces as tacky. In any event, his prints of idyllic cottages and bucolic garden gates helped establish a brand — famed for their painted highlights — not commonly seen in the art world.
“I’m a warrior for light,” Kinkade told the Mercury News in 2002, alluding not just to his technical skill at creating light on canvas but to the medieval practice of using light to symbolize the divine.
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Art Critic Jerry Saltz did not have very kind words for the deceased or for his artistic pronouncements.
Kinkade’s “serene simplicity” wasn’t limited to his ideas about imagery. They had everything to do with what Andy Warhol called “business art.” Kinkade was willing to go the full Warhol. He mass-produced his pictures, making prints and images painted by factories filled with assistants. A recent ad advertised “a Master Highlighter Event … an 8-hour personal stage appearance by a certified Thomas Kinkade Master Highlighter. At the event, a highlighter enhances images of the gallery’s choice.” Needless to say, these are the very things that artists like Kinkade, and of late David Hockney, have railed about when they’re done by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, or Damien Hirst. In fact Kinkade makes Koons & Co. look like a boutique. After all, Jeff Koons never built his own gated communities in California, with houses and grounds in the likeness of his paintings, with starting prices at $425,000. (As for creating serenity, it’s often mentioned that Kinkade “has a long history of cursing and heckling other artists and performers … that he openly groped a woman’s breasts … and once relieved himself on a Winnie the Pooh figure while saying “This one’s for you, Walt.”
What’s the difference between NYM and NR? Coming across John Derbyshire’s politically incorrect remarks in Taki’s Magazine the other day, I complimented Derbyshire on his courage and quoted and linked the piece.
National Review, on the other hand, responded by firing him.
I did not mean to specifically subscribe to Derbyshire’s estimate of the precise percentage of the African-American community constituting its dangerously Xenophobic portion or to his specific figures pertaining to intelligence found in sample populations, but I certainly did take the view that Derbyshire was basically saying aloud what everybody knows and what everybody considers forbidden to say out loud.
NR’s editor Rich Lowry hastily lifted the ancient conservative journal’s petticoats high in the air, emitted a shrill scream, and leaped high upon a chair upon being confronted with a piece of commentary published in a different venue by an NR contributor containing such sentiments. Like Stella Gibbons’ Aunt Ada Doom, in Cold Comfort Farm, Editor Lowry seems liable to be scarred and traumatized for life as the result of encountering “something nasty,” not in the woodshed, but rather in Taki Theodoracopoulas’s webzine.
Derbyshire’s comments, warning non-African Americans to be careful of African American neighborhoods and groups, Lowry opined, were not only “nasty.” They were indefensible and outlandish.
Lowry, of course, did not explain that he was firing Derbyshire for violating the speech taboos defined by political correctness. That wouldn’t look well. No, no, he was firing Derbyshire for exploiting his association with National Review. No one, Lowry implies, would think of bothering to read Derbyshire published in Takimag, were he not a grand and magnificent member of the NR writing stable. The bounder, Lowery explained, was using NR’s brand “to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves. … So there has to be a parting of the ways.”
It’s important to clarify these things. If NR failed to fire Derbyshire, it’s perfectly obvious, isn’t it? that all of NR’s readers would naturally assume that all NR writers and editors and all the features, editorials, and reviews published in NR, past, present, and future implicitly endorsed everything John Derbyshire did, wrote, thought, or said otherwise. That’s how journal publication works.
The fact that during the very same Easter weekend news reports appeared featuring excerpts of videos being distributed on the Net showing a crowd of Baltimore African Americans beating, robbing, and gleefully stripping naked a drunken white tourist on St. Patrick’s Day inevitably further underlined the outlandishness and indefensibility of Derbyshire’s observations.
The great American racial comedy proceeds ad infinitum, with Derbyshire’s martyrdom at conservative hands representing a particularly funny interlude between weeks of agitation over Trayvon Martin and the latest racial outrage on the streets of Baltimore.
It is a little dispiriting that the left had hardly begun agitating for John Derbyshire’s execution when prominent representatives of the right had already proactively removed his head. (Derbyshire wasn’t only fired by Lowry. He was denounced by Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru as well.
Of course, this is a tempest in an inkpot. The emolument for contributions to journals of opinion, even NR, is undoubtedly nothing terribly large, and writing for Takimag probably does not pay much less than writing for NR.
But all this does demonstrate, once again, just how thoroughly the culture of Puritan hypocrisy and cant continues to dominate American intellectual life.
What really happened here is that another of those unruly expatriate Brits came up against the (from his point of view) silly and bizarre cultural taboos enforced on this side of the Atlantic. In Europe generally, and in Britain in particular, franker speech, and bolder humor, on racial matters typically prevails. The Brits and Europeans have, in this area, at least, freer speech than do we.
Derbyshire really ought to have been awarded special clemency, on the basis of the Americans With Disabilities Act, since in his capacity as a heterosexual Briton he cannot possibly be expected to understand, or enter into, our domestic American racial hypocrisies and neuroses.
NYM is not quite alone in defending Derbyshire, the Village Voice lists other offenders.
The century anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic is right around the corner. James Cameron’s record box office winner “Titanic” (1997) will be returning to the theaters in 3D, and we can expect the networks to be running round-the-clock broadcasts of the regular version.
Lindy West of Gawker sat down and watched the interminable Leonardo DiCaprio tearjerker and offers to spare us having to bother. Her review is devastating and extremely funny.
I don’t remember a lot of specifics about watching Titanic in theaters in 1997, but I was 15 years old, which means my two biggest concerns were 1) locating romance, and 2) not dying in a nautical catastrophe. So I think we can safely assume that I fucking loved that movie. I watched Titanic again on TV with my sister a few years later, making sure to switch it off right before that whole stressful iceberg thingy—a strategy that turns the movie into a pleasant romp about two teenagers who take a perfectly safe boat ride and then bang in a jalopy. The end. Charming! Watching Titanic for a third time this weekend—in advance of Wednesday’s big 3D reopening—I cannot imagine what I was thinking that second time around. I could not wait to get to the second half and watch all these motherfuckers drown.
Here’s the thing about Titanic, and the reason 15-year-old girls love it so much: James Cameron is a 15-year-old girl. All of the characters are either 15-year-old girls in disguise (“Parents just don’t understand!” “Waaah, make the boat go faster!” “I know we literally met 20 minutes ago, but I love you with a suicidal fervor!”), or the kind of goofy caricatures that 15-year-old girls would write if we let 15-year-old girls write our blockbuster screenplays. It’s She’s All That on a Boat, only with Kate Winslet as Freddie Prinze Jr., Leonardo DiCaprio as that girl who isn’t famous anymore, and also everyone freezes to death in the north Atlantic at the end.
John Derbyshire wins the valor award for the boldest, baddest, and most politically incorrect posting of the year.
A small cohort of blacks—in my experience, around five percent—is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us. A much larger cohort of blacks—around half—will go along passively if the five percent take leadership in some event. They will do this out of racial solidarity, the natural willingness of most human beings to be led, and a vague feeling that whites have it coming.
Thus, while always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals, on the many occasions where you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences, use statistical common sense:
Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.
Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.
If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).
Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.
If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.
Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.
Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.
Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.
If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.
He goes right on then to say really forbidden things about comparative statistical intelligence. Needless to say, the left is having a cow over this one. Charles Johnson‘s hissy fit is typical.
We all know that what Derbyshire says is perfectly true, but we also know that we’re not allowed to say such things.
